It was too late to turn around. Reflexively I dropped as the ax swished past my ears. I heard the metallic smack of steel on steel, saw the blade bounce off the door frame as my body slammed into the deck and pain exploded inside.
Falling onto a steel deck is like being hit with hammers. An electric current jolted into my left kneecap. A fiery torch had been thrust into my right shin. My elbow was numb. I saw the Beretta drop to the deck, heard it clatter away, beyond the looming figure storming in from the corridor. I rolled left, slammed into a wall, just as the ax hit the spot where I’d lain a moment earlier. The room was too cramped. Each leg motion sent streaks of agony up my spine. He jabbed the ax at me. I rolled as it glanced off the sink and sliced through a toilet paper roll, easy as skin.
He went for my head, staying far enough away so I could not reach him. My ankle made a popping noise when I pushed back. I tried to scramble up but a giant seemed to tear in two the tendons on my ankle. I kicked out with the other leg, kept him back, but a fifty-ton truck must have rolled over my leg.
Why did he come back for me? Maybe he thought I recognized him through the faceplate.
His face inside the shield was bulging and white and streaming sweat. The formerly pleasant features were twisted with rage. Perspiration flooded my eyes. There was no room to back up. I gathered all my strength and, when he jabbed again, swung the bad leg in a roundabout kick, making contact with the side of the ax head with my boot, pushing it left as I screamed from the pain.
The momentum swung him off balance. I tried to lunge past him and reach the Beretta, and actually touched it, actually felt fingers brush steel, but then he was on me. His hood fell off. His breath smelled of garlic. His eyes were huge and furious. I saw veins in his nostrils, and dandruff caught in an eyebrow. His fingers were vises, pressing into my throat.
“You… should have… killed them,” he said.
I could not breathe but I pulled the trigger, heard the M9 go off. Nothing. I fired again, heard ricochets in the corridor. I felt a sting at the edge of my ear. The ricocheting bullet had winged the marksman.
He straddled me. I was losing consciousness. His right knee pinned my left hand on deck, his hip blocked movement of my right. I needed all my remaining strength to push the gun three inches toward his belly. I pulled the trigger, and with my oxygen cut off, sound seemed louder.
He was still there.
Maybe the noise had attracted attention, because I heard running, and someone shouting, “Hey! Hey!”
I could breathe. He was running off. A woman’s face was bending over me. I recognized the small blonde, an Alabaman, an officer who worked night shifts on the bridge.
“Colonel? Are you all right? Colonel?”
I gasped for air. I forced out, “Where’d he go?”
“Into the stairwell. Look, he left something in the sink. It’s another one! Carla! Call the incendiary crew!”
Two minutes later, limping, I found the other white-suited figure who had been with Del Grazo, crumbled, around the corner, blood spurting from a wound opening his left side. Ribs caved in. Just a kid. An eighteen-year-old who’d not known the figure he was running with was the man for whom he’d been searching.
“Colonel, we’re fighting four fires now! He left devices all over the place!”
As for Del Grazo, he was, once again, gone.
His words a drumbeat in my head.
You should have killed them.
By the time the ship exec spotted him, the radio room was wrecked, the fires were under control, but the Zodiac was overboard, and he was inside, pulling away in the dark, hoping to be absorbed into the inky blackness, natural color of the Arctic sea in summers these days, not white, as it had been for centuries until now.
With satellites blocked off and the radio room burned, the only two means of communication remaining with the outside world were the line-of-sight handhelds, good at a measly six miles… and the long-range radio from the bridge, that is, if atmospheric conditions cooperated, and if, the huge if, the cable running from the radio room had not melted.
But if the cable was out, we had no way of reaching the mainland, or any ships, or anyone at all more than six miles away.
Del Grazo was waiting for darkness to get away. He was using the fires to give him time, and distract the crew.
He’d needed only a few minutes to manually release the Zodiac, climb in, ride it down to the sea, and disconnect the hooks.
Del Grazo turning black also, man blending in with sea.
“Night vision,” I snapped, watching Del Grazo disappear.
Crew lined the railings. Some held binoculars. Others, like me, wore cyclops night vision monoculars, which used ambient star or moonlight to — under normal circumstances on the Wilmington — track whales surfacing in dark, or walrus, seals, polar bears.
“What is this guy, invisible?” said Eddie, scanning.
“Where the hell could he be going?”
“He’s using that berg piece as cover. There!”
I’d spotted a human figure two hundred yards off, a silhouette actually, at the Zodiac steering console, staying low, knees down, as he emerged from behind a three-foot-high protruding bit of ice, just high enough to shield a man. I heard M4 fire beside me in a three-round burst. The figure kept moving, well within range, but now that we were out of the ice, the open water was choppy. The ship rocked back and forth, the Zodiac up and down. It was hard to hit anything at this distance when both parties were moving in three directions at the same time.
Del Grazo slipped behind another small ice bit, and must have slowed down, because he didn’t come out.
DeBlieu ordered another Zodiac lowered.
Pettit came up and joined the Marine marksman, pointed to where the figure had disappeared. Both men resting elbows on the railing, staring fixedly into the gloom ahead.
Pettit muttering, “I think he moved behind another piece. See the ice shaped like an hourglass?”
“The two humps? The camel shape?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait, sir, there’s two pieces camel shaped,” the other Marine said. “The two o’clock? Or the four o’clock?”
“You think two o’clock looks like a camel?”
“Well, what do you think it looks like?”
“I don’t know. Breasts,” suggested Pettit.
The kid looked up, astonished. “You think a camel looks like breasts?”
DeBlieu interrupted. “Stop the fucking Rorschach test. The Zodiac is down.”
Eddie came up beside us, stamping to keep warm. “Do you mind telling me where the hell he’s going, middle of nowhere? Guy’ll freeze to death in a few hours. What is he doing?”
Del Grazo’s ice shield was a ghost bit beneath a speck of moon, but even that faded as clouds thickened, massed low, cut down on even ambient light. The damn Arctic weather seemed to change every ten minutes here.
Inside the ship, I knew that crew searched for more incendiaries, moving from cabin to cabin. But the fires were out.
“I just don’t understand… oh shit,” moaned Pettit. “Look!”
I did and my heart sank as it all came together. I saw — in green — five hundred yards off, a frothing, surging milkshake of activity, foaming water erupting, and then the big sub thrust upward, bigger than a bowhead. Biggest thing under the sea. Welcome to the new Arctic.
“He’s baaaackkk,” said Eddie morosely. “Let’s hear a big round of applause from the studio audience for Captain Zhou!”
The sub came out clean, smacked back down, and sent up spray. The black eel-shape positioned itself to block any more shots at Peter Del Grazo. We couldn’t see him anymore. He must have called them. He’d set up a rendezvous with his masters, then delayed until he could get off the ship.